If you’ve spent any time in Brooklyn Heights, or if, like your correspondent, you live in this building, you’ve seen this awning and thought, “‘Breukelen,’ that looks a lot like ‘Brooklyn’.” With any knowledge of history you may have concluded that this was the name the Dutch settlers gave to this place, later Anglicized as Brooklyn.
As this Brooklyn Paper story tells us, what the residents of Breukelen, The Netherlands, think of as the original Brooklyn Bridge has recently completed the latest of many reconstructions. The Brooklyn Paper story also gives us a link to a video of a ceremony on May 21, 2021, celebrating the 375th anniversary of the founding of Breukelen/Brooklyn, New York and the signing of an agreement between then Borough President Eric Adams and Ap Reinders, Mayor of Stichtse Vecht, the municipality that includes Breukelen, commemorating the anniversary and proclaiming the continued kinship of the two places.
The video is 27 minutes long. It begins with three lovely Dutch women singing the Star Spangled Banner, followed by the Dutch national anthem. It includes short remarks by Mayor Reinders and then BP Adams, and many scenic views of Breukelen and Brooklyn. There’s a long segment about the history of Breukelen, in Dutch With English subtitles, followed by a history of the Dutch in Brooklyn by Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger.
